Payback: A Strandville Zombie Series Short (2 page)

The man
rested the knife’s pointed tip against Jacob’s bunny blanket.

Jess
strained to see what he was doing despite the searing pain in her shoulders.

“Please, don’t hurt him.”
Her voice cracked. “I swear, Max is at the garage. He went to work early.”

The
fat man behind her snickered and thrust her forward, bending her over the kitchen table. “Do you think we’re stupid or something? You think we didn’t go there first? His boss shitcanned him a week ago. Either you tell us where he is, or cough up the twenty-seven grand he owes. Our boss doesn’t cover bad bets.”

T
wenty-seven thousand dollars.

Fired?

Max had lied to her for the last time.

“What if I call him home? Give me two hours. I can get him here.”

The men looked at one another and then at Jacob. 

“I can’t take much more of this
crying baby shit.”

“Please,”
Jess said, “Where am I going to go with a newborn baby?”

“Two hours,” said the scrawny man. “And if Reid’s not here when we come back, that crying will stop being a problem, you understand me?”

Breast milk leaked through Jess’s nursing pads and bra and soaked the front of her shirt.

“I understand,” she said,
praying she had enough time to run.

* * * * *

The morning sun burned through the windshield and Max lowered the visor. He flipped open the vanity mirror and examined the scratches extending from the corner of his eye to his jaw. “What am I going to tell Jess?”

Mitch shrugged.

Max looked back at the woman, unconscious in the back of the van.
“So, we’re taking her to the Nixon Center?”

Mitch turned the corner
, and the woman’s body rolled from one side of the van to the other. “
We’re
not taking her anywhere. You’re going home.”

He pulled up to Max’s
apartment and waved for him to get out.

Max
looked, again, at the angry red scratches that looked clearly like four fingernails. He stood half-in and half-out of the open passenger’s side door, waiting for an envelope. “You said five grand.”

“Twenty-five hundred each, but I don’t have it yet. Payment on delivery. Clean yourself up, Max.
I’ll be in touch.”

Max shut the door and
walked down the crumbling sidewalk toward his apartment. Even from fifty feet he could see something was wrong. Mitch pulled away and Max ran toward home. The front doorknob wiggled and nearly broke off in his hand. The splintered jamb stuck out in wooden protrusions and there was an indentation that looked like the end of a crow bar.

He couldn’t get inside fast enough.

“Jess, baby, are you here?” His heart pounded and he flushed with sweat. “Jess, honey. Answer me.” A large knife sat on the counter and he looked for blood. “Jess!” He swallowed the knot of fear in his throat. Jacob’s bassinette sat empty in the middle of the kitchen. His bunny blanket was on the floor next to it. “Jess, come on. Answer me.” He listened for muffled sounds or crying, but it was the silence that scared him the most. He rushed into the back bedroom and found the bifold closet doors open. The right one hung askew off its track and Jess’s side of the closet was empty. Jacob’s dresser, too.

Max didn’t know whether to smile or cry. Jess had left him, but at least she was alive. At least his son was alive.
He sat on the edge of the unmade bed and held Jess’s pillow to his face. He breathed in the smell of the strawberry shampoo he’d fallen asleep to every night for two years and refused to cry. He set the pillow down and opened the blinds. A stream of sunlight settled on a square of folded paper sitting on the nightstand. The edges were worn, the folds nearly torn from excessive handling. He picked it up, opened it carefully, and read the page three times before comprehending what it said.

The results of a paternity test confirmed that Jacob wasn’t his son.

He was Mitch’s.

* * * * *

Mitch backed into the receiving entrance at the rear of the Nixon Healing and Research Center. Jim Lockard, the center’s maintenance man, met him at the roll up door with a gurney and a Hispanic orderly named Miguel.

J
.D. barked relentlessly. He needed to go to the bathroom and Mitch hoped for a quick drop-off. When Jim approached, he knew he wasn’t going to get it.

Mitch rolled down the driver’s side window
. “Where’s Dr. Nixon?” He closed his hand gently around J.D.’s muzzle so he could hear what Jim was saying.

“He’s not coming.”
Jim passed two yellow envelopes through the half-open glass, one for him and one for Max.

Miguel
opened the rear doors and grabbed Carlene’s ankles, dragging her across the van’s metal floor. He turned her so that he could get his arms under her and transferred her to the gurney. She moaned, and after situating her restraints, Miguel hit her with another dose of sedative. He banged on the side of the van and waved for Mitch to come help him. 

“Now what?” Mitch pocketed the envelopes and stepped out.

Miguel babbled something in Spanish and pointed toward the lobby.

Jim shook his head. “Nixon wants you to take her
downstairs. There was a problem earlier and this guy’s too shaken to go down there. I had hoped you were bringing back-up.”

“I don’t want Max here. That wasn’t part of the deal.”

“Then you’re on your own.”

Mitch slipped the collar over J.D.’s head and tightened it one notch. He lifted him out of the box and handed him to Jim.

“Fine,” he said. “But I need your elevator key and you’re walking my dog.”

* * * * *

Mitch had covered Carlene’s body with a white sheet he’d taken from Miguel and tried to avoid eye contact with staff and visitors as he waited for the elevator that was the only way down to the Nixon Center basement. 

The seconds from the lobby to the basement felt like minutes; the minutes walking down the hall where the
test subjects were held, like hours. The air was thick with the stench of decomposition, which burned his nose and made his eyes water.

A year before,
five patients with an inexplicable illness were air lifted to the center from a remote area of Haiti. Three of them were family--a father, mother, and their son. Two were male researchers sent to investigate the young boy who died and spontaneously resurrected in front of half of his village. Nixon intended to cure them, but when he couldn’t, his experiment changed. Rumors circulated, but Mitch knew better than to ask for details. He kidnapped the women, took the envelopes, and whatever happened next, at least it didn’t happen to him.

* * * * *

Max pulled up his sweatshirt hood and walked down the first floor hallway, careful to avoid being seen by the Nixon Center security cameras as he made his way to the locked security office and knocked. 

“Mitch, open up.”
His instinct was to pound the door flat, to kick it in and drag Mitch into the hallway, but he knew better than to draw that kind of attention. He knocked again. “Mitch, you piece of shit,” he said through his clenched teeth, “I know you’re in there.”

“Can I help you?”
A young guard, a good foot shorter than Max and at least a hundred pounds lighter, appeared behind him holding a Taser. His nametag said “Brian Foster” and he wore Nixon Center blues and a pair of black-rimmed glasses.

“I need to see Mitch
.”

Foster
shook his head. “I’m sorry. I can’t help you.”

Max checked to see that no one was watching and flashed
Foster his holstered pistol. “I’m not leaving without talking to him.”

Brian went for his radio and Max grabbed his wrist. He spun him around
easily and shoved him into the door hard enough to twist the glasses on his face.

“Open
it.”

“I don’t…”

“Before you tell me you don’t have keys, realize I know more about this place than you think.”

“Is that so, Mr. Reid?” Dr. Howard Nixon
appeared wearing surgical scrubs and a white lab coat that barely masked the blood stains.

“
I need to see Mitch.” Max held his ground, tightening his grip on Foster and pulling his gun. 

“I wouldn’t do anything rash if I were you.”
Nixon pointed at the mirror in the corner and the smoked camera lens to the side of it. “If you’ll do me the courtesy of letting Brian go,” Nixon said, “maybe we can help each other.”

Max did as
Nixon asked and in the hour that followed, accepted permanent employment and his next off-site assignment.

* * * * *

It was almost midnight and Max was running on a dangerous combination of adrenaline, paranoia, and anger, having looked over his shoulder for his bookie or his men every minute since leaving his apartment.

He turned off his headlights and pulled into the
woods using an old access road overgrown with saplings and ferns. Thin branches scraped along the sides of his truck and the shrill sound pierced the late night silence. He parked out of sight of the ramshackle cabin a few hundred feet on the other side of the tree line and looked for a clear footpath.

An old pick-up truck idled in the driveway and the smell of exhaust choked him as he made his way through the trees. He covered his mouth to stifle the cough and took
calculated steps, careful to avoid being heard.

A young, pimple-faced boy
in a gas station attendant’s uniform slammed the front door and took a drag off the cigarette pinched between his thin lips. He climbed into the truck’s driver’s seat and tore out onto the highway with the hurriedness of someone who was late. Sparks trailed as his dangling exhaust connected with the pavement.

Max took the syringe out of his pocket.

Nixon insisted there be no signs of struggle and was upset to know how things had gone with Carlene, the girl he and Mitch kidnapped earlier that morning. His obvious disappointment with Mitch made it that much easier to negotiate terms for himself. Max had yet to make the connection between the infected men and the kidnapped woman, but whatever research Nixon performed in the sterile, basement labs was not something anyone would want for their sister, wife, or
girlfriend.

Max
made his way to the side of the house, keeping to the shadows despite the fact that the cabin sat in the middle of acres of woods and grass. He crouched beneath a half-open window and watched Amy Porter tie back her stringy hair and dab some kind of cream on her spotty complexion. She brushed her teeth and adjusted the button-down nightshirt riding up the back of her underwear before heading down the hall to what he assumed was a back bedroom.

J.D. barked in his kennel, making it a little easier for Max to work without being detected. He
pried the screen from the window. The blue latex gloves made it hard to maneuver the pins and the whole thing crashed at his feet. He held his breath for the seconds that followed and when Amy didn’t appear, pulled himself up through the ground-level opening. The wooden frame bit into his shoulders as he twisted to pass through.

The uneven floors creaked under Max’s steps
, his approach masked by relentless barking, and as he closed in on the bedroom, he replayed every conversation he’d ever had with Mitch about Amy. Part of him believed that Mitch thought he was protecting her, belittling how much she meant to him. Part of him knew it was embarrassment. Max had known Mitch since he was six-years-old and some things didn’t need to be said between
friends.
Against his will, Max imagined Mitch with Jess, in his house and in his bed and able to face him afterward like nothing had happened. But something had. Something more betraying and terrible and cruel than even his mind could conjure.

He
entered the bedroom and found Amy, eyes closed, listening to music through a pair of ear bud headphones. She was lying on her side, arm stretched overhead. The way Jess slept after her pregnant stomach became too big for her to lie on her back. He held the uncapped syringe between his teeth and pounced on her, pinning her down and stuffing a wadded up t-shirt into her mouth to silence her screams. He tore off her panties, wanting to take from her what Mitch had taken from Jess. She fought back and spit the gag out twice before he buried it so deep in her mouth that she struggled for breath. He reached to unzip his pants and something told him to stop, a memory of the deal he’d made earlier that day. Whatever Nixon had planned for Amy would be worse than rape, or death and Mitch would know every last detail of her suffering. Max plunged the needle into Amy’s bare thigh and her body wilted. He collected her in his arms and imagined Mitch’s reaction to finding her, restrained to a hospital bed in the Nixon Center basement. He slipped the paternity test into the breast pocket of Amy’s nightshirt where Mitch would see it and slung her over his shoulder.